A Feral Darkness (30 page)

      
She was inclined to take him seriously.

      
"Okay," he repeated, and relaxed a little. "Good." He stood, unfolding in a way that took a certain amount of grace and strength but mainly had to do with the way he was built. He held out a hand to her, a hand she didn't need.

      
Truce.

      
She took it.

      
And, on her feet and wiping off the seat of her jeans, sighing and wondering what, after all of that, they'd truly accomplished, she said, "What now, then? If what you've said is true..."

      
"It's true enough," he told her. "But I can't tell you
what now
. I may have an understanding of what's happened...but how to deal with it? Not even my sorgin mother ever came up against
this
. But it strikes me that it would be a good thing to learn all you can about Mars Nodens. If we're going to get help, that's where it'll come from."

      
She nodded; that made sense. And she shivered, suddenly and unexpectedly, for the first time struck with the reality of what she'd done. Brenna Lynn, nine years old and not ready to let go of an old canine friend, accompanied by both chance and determination, had touched a...

      
She wouldn't think
god
. She wasn't ready for that. A
force
. A force that had made her what she was today—someone who'd always sheltered herself from her own lifelong sense of
differentness
. Different from other girls...different from what her family wanted of her. Devoted to dogs. And somehow now stuck in a job where if she and the dogs weren't at odds, she and her manager were at odds over the dogs' best interests—and her own health and safety.

      
Somewhere along there, she'd taken a wrong turn.

      
"What are you thinking?" Masera asked suddenly. Quietly. Close to her again.

      
She shook her head, wondering when she'd gotten so tired. "Nothing," she said. "Or maybe something, but enough's enough." She put her hands over her face—the sweatshirt sleeves had fallen down again, and she pressed the soft material to her eyes—trying to straighten her thoughts out a little, to bring them to some conclusion. "What about Parker?" she said, sliding her hands down just enough to look over the tops of her fingers.

      
That's when he went away—from her, from the conversation. When he drew within himself to the place where he knew things he wasn't sharing. "Never mind about Parker. Stay clear of him."

      
She didn't let it go this time. "You know something you're not telling me."

      
Caught, he hesitated, and gave a short nod. "Yes."

      
Back to where they'd started, days ago. She could trust parts of him...and other parts of him, the parts that had been interested in Rob Parker all along, had been beaten up, had bought two pit bulls in back-lot transition...

      
Those parts, she didn't trust in the least.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CHAPTER 12
HAGALAZ
Destructive Forces
Brenna grabbed a few minutes at the end of the day to look at the half-dozen groomer applications they'd received, sorting swiftly and setting all but one aside—and knowing that one was likely wishful thinking. Well. At least they'd
had
this many applications so quickly, although most of them were from high school students who wanted a quick summer job and thought that fooling with dogs was a great thing for which to get paid.

      
"No good, huh?" DaNise said, taking a noisy and well-earned slurp of her soda; she too was overdue to go off-shift. Elizabeth was already working in the back, with enough dogs left to finish so she'd be lucky even to grab a snack from the under-counter stash. Like Brenna, DaNise still wore her smock, but hers came down to her knees and looked pretty much soaked through from her shift of heavy bathing. From the neck up she was impeccable, with a complexly molded hairstyle that only African-American hair could accomplish.

      
That was the secret between their easy amiability, Brenna had always thought—upon first introduction, DaNise had said, "Your hair is awesome!" and Brenna had said, "How do you
do
that?" and despite the difference in their ages—DaNise would still be in high school, if she hadn't qualified for early graduation and was now saving up tuition for the community college—and backgrounds, they'd formed an immediate connection.

      
Brenna fanned the applications in the air. "No good," she confirmed. "You've got more qualifications to groom than any of 'em." She gave an automatic glance around the store front and said, "Don't tell Roger I said that. He'll decide I should train you, as if I can do that
and
carry a full grooming load."

      
"No worries," said DaNise. "No offense, but I got plans."

      
Brenna gave her a wistful look. "Smart you."

      
DaNise shrugged. "Hey, girl, it's not too late."

      
Brenna made a quick scrawl of a note on the borderline application. "Yeah, well," she said, as if that were saying anything at all. She let the pen drop into the plastic mug pen holder with a decisive clink. "I'm going to get while the getting's good." Half an hour over her shift as it was, but that was hardly worth noting. She shed the smock and tossed it on a hook in the grooming room; Elizabeth came breezing out of the tub room and followed her back out. She went straight to the schedule, flipping through it with a frown. "Gonna be even tighter tomorrow," she said. "Maybe I'll see if Roger'll let me clock in half an hour early."

      
"Be a good idea if you can handle it," Brenna agreed, leaning against the door into the store proper and bumping the push bar with the small of her back. She spotted a woman with a small carrier—cat or rabbit, had to be—on her way in from the parking lot, and lifted her chin to alert Elizabeth. "Nails, I'll bet. Nothing on the schedule that would fit in that one."

      
"Shit, it's a mess back there," Elizabeth said, and hastily cleared the upper level of the counter. Which was what they did when things got too booked and a small animal came in for nail clipping, as long as the animal in question was a quiet one, and even though it wasn't the best arrangement in the world by far. Brenna hung by the door, halfway between curious and lacking the inertia to move.

      
The young woman breezed in along with a waft of expensive perfume, resting long, blunt cut and manicured nails on the counter. "I'm a little late—is Brenna Fallon still here? I'd like to have her cut my cat's nails, please."

      
Behind her, Brenna widened her eyes at Elizabeth, pleading.
No!
And since her name badge was on the rolled up smock, she might as well not be. DaNise, still sipping her soda, pressed her lips firmly together over the straw, trying not to smile. Without skipping a beat, Elizabeth said, "She's not on right now, but I'm Elizabeth and I'd be glad to take care of you. How does your cat feel about nail clipping? And are you up-to-date on rabies?"

      
"Her tag is on her collar," the woman said. "She's always been just fine about clipping, I just can't bring myself to do it. I can't stand the thought of cutting too close and making her bleed. I heard the other woman was good with cats."

      
Hmmm. No more or less than any other groomer, not when it came to cats. Brenna gave Elizabeth a silent
who knows?
shrug. But someone, at some time, must have left the store happy enough to spread the word.

      
"She
is
good, though we're all experienced," Elizabeth said, though as she came around the counter, clippers in hand, she took advantage of the woman's attentiveness to her cat to make a face at Brenna.

      
Brenna returned it in full. She waited just long enough for Elizabeth to draw the cat out of the carrier and to see that the animal was docile enough; then she escaped through the door, heading down the main aisle past the bays of dog, cat, fish, and small animal supplies, once more thankful that the grooming room wasn't wired to the constant broadcast of tropical jungle noises that filled the rest of the store.

      
Halfway to the break room—and the time clock—a familiar wash of cold fear struck her, so fleetingly quick she wondered if she'd imagined it. But she hesitated, and something made her look back toward the grooming room. Something made her turn around and take a few steps back the way she'd come, almost colliding with a customer in the doing of it.

      
Nothing amiss there. Nothing but the woman holding her cat's collar while Elizabeth started on what must have been the last foot, carefully pressing each toe to express the nail, her lips moving in a murmur of private conversation with the creature.

      
"Excuse me, can you tell me where the collars are?"

      
Brenna glanced away from the grooming counter—an instant, that's all it was, an instant—and the screaming started. The screaming and the cold dark fear and the whirl of the world around her—bright packaging and toys and giant rawhides and
screaming
—and the clutch of someone's fingers on her arm, inadvertently bringing her back to reality. The customer, a middle-aged woman, gripping her arm in horror, staring at that of which Brenna was only now making sense.

      
Elizabeth, screaming at the cat, the two of them locked in a whirlwind of battle, blood spraying across the glass, the cat screaming back at Elizabeth, both of them moving too fast to see the detail of it, and a voice in Brenna's head chanting the
wrongness
of it.
Wrong, wrong, wrong
for a cat to attack and maul so viciously. Wrong for it to have been
Elizabeth
—

      
And then it was over, and Elizabeth somehow had a grip on the cat's scruff. The woman who owned it had fled outside and stood pressed against the door, her mouth open in shock; DeNise huddled in the corner behind the counter. Dazed and wounded, Elizabeth looked up and met Brenna's eyes, somehow finding her halfway across the store—holding the cat in one hand, her other hand up and dripping blood, blood streaming down both arms to collect in the folds of her smock arms and dribble off her elbow, her face crumpling.

      
Suddenly Brenna could move again. No one else stirred, no one else knew where to start. Brenna, suddenly awake again, ran.

      
And still she wasn't the first one there.

      
Masera
.

      
Masera beat her to the door and whipped himself through it, stopping there to speak low words to Elizabeth, and to move slowly—not upsetting either of them. Brenna hesitated in the open door, unwilling to upset the balance with her entrance. The cat hung quiescent, defeated; it might as well have been dead for the fuss it put up as Masera pried it from Elizabeth's battered fingers and stuffed it back into its carrier, slick with her blood.

      
As soon as he jammed the carrier door into place, Brenna threw herself into the room. "Call for a manager," she told Masera, squeezing past him to reach Elizabeth. Elizabeth stood with her hands held as though they were foreign objects on the ends of her arms, and even as Brenna reached her, she started to shake. With a hand at her back, Brenna guided her through the grooming room and into the noisy roar of the tub room, muttering soothing nonsense as she grabbed a clean white towel from the laundry service and flung it over her shoulder.